Category: Exhibitions

Galleries and Museums and other spaces.

ArtSlant: Black-out Viewing at Center

The Power of Doubt, curated by Hou Hanru

Guangdong Times Museum, Times Rose Garden, Huang Bian Bei Lu, Bai Yun Da Dao, 510440 Guangzhou

17 December, 2011 – 6 February, 2012

Doubt is a concept close to my heart (for all the right – and wrong reasons). It is a state of being separated from fixed ideas, moving into a region where certainties flicker out like an ageing fluorescent strip. I feel this movement into doubt is a primary activity of art: simulation, illusion, questioning, all the while leaving the audience open to new thoughts and ways of thinking. The artist does things and I ask: “Why are they doing this?” Doubt is a region of productivity, of investigation, of crossing boundaries in every category, the genesis of potentiality.

The title of Hou Hanru’s show “The Politics of Doubt” at Times Museum immediately suggested a presentation which might display a sense of instability through the works, but what I ended up seeing was a set of rather stable—albeit interesting—works of photography and video, under a fairly simplistic curatorial premise.

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ArtSlant: In Deep Water

Xi Sha—South China Sea Project No.1: Xu Qu solo show

HEMUSE Gallery, 3-038, North Area, Pinggod Shequ, 32 Baiziwan Road, Chaoyang District, 100022 Beijing

10 December, 2011 – 10 February, 2012

Entering the contested islands of the South China Sea, artist Xu Qu plays with the disjunction between the hopes and wishes that territory embodies and the reality of the places and their constitutive activities.

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ArtSlant: Out Is etc.

Tilted Horizon: Lei Benben solo show

Boers-Li Gallery, 1-706 Hou Jie, 798 Art District, No.2 Yuan, Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijing 100015, China

9 December, 2011 – 13 January, 2012

While the basic theme of Lei Benben’s three works in Tilted Horizon at Boers-Li Gallery may be water, a perhaps more interesting and powerful linking element is their conceptual framework, which sees them setting up interactions with the spaces within and outside of the frame.

These videos, in their various formats, deliberately reach beyond the frame, setting up a strong relation to the space. The familiar strips of beach and sea of Horizon (2011) are at an angle within the projection’s rectangle, dipping into the bottom-left corner, exactly fitting into the rectangular space at one end of the gallery. The sea is and is no longer the sea, departing from its cliché, it becomes a line across the screen, across the wall, while the breakers continue to crash against the sand.

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ArtSlant: UCCA Blows Up

Zhan Wang: My Personal Universe

UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, 798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China 100015

26 November, 2011 – 25 February, 2012

In what might be read as a change in direction for Zhan Wang, the new large-scale installation at UCCA broadens his works’ outlook from the establishment of monuments to the creation of the universe as creative material. In the process the artist addresses some big questions about our place in the universe, but ultimately manages to lose his sympathetic connection with the human body.

His long-running Artificial Rock series of scholars’ rocks recreated in stainless steel now dot the world, playing with the role of the monumental in public space. Critic Huang Du sees them as existing between tradition and modernity, and these contemporary versions of the traditional stones literally and symbolically reflect the appearance of whatever is around them in their polished forms. But this trope has now become ubiquitous, almost a cliché, so how does the artist progress?

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